Nirvana Album Recommendations: "In Utero"

Album Recommendations: In Utero

The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Nirvana

[#] In Utero (1993)

Violently funereal.

Reviewed November 18, 2024

Even failing Kurt's suicide, there was nowhere else for the Nirvana sound to go after In Utero. It was the perfect storm—band, producer, studio. Nirvana were excellent performers, loud, aggressive, tight. Kurt was on a high with his songwriting. The songs were evocative, blood and bile oozing out of the accessible confines of the song structures, the lyrics about murderers stealing the essences of women, lobotomized actresses, Leonard Cohen, umbilical nooses. No one else could've brought out the raw violence of that material quite like the notorious Steve Albini, and the icy, isolated wilds of Minnesota were the ideal locale for recording, let's come straight out and say it, Nirvana's finest album. They would not have topped this. I am confident saying that.

What Nirvana lacked in the experimentation you'd expect from a developing band (no song on here really splits from verse-chorus-verse, as Kurt famously put it), they made up for in the creepy, agonized screech that In Utero regularly presents. Guitar solos take the form of piercing feedback. The natural room reverb hugging Kurt's throat-scorched hollers paints a vivid scene, like the man is being tortured in front of you. Dave Grohl's boomy drumming is as rock-steady as it is savage on cuts like "Scentless Apprentice", and Krist Novoselic keeps it in the pocket, coolly completing Nirvana's rhythm section. Never ceasing (in fact, only ramping up in intensity towards the end), it's "All Apologies"' coda, flatlining into feedback and hushed moans, that shows the tormented beast's final twitches.